Exodus: A memoir (7 page)

Hebrew is certainly a language that invites the obsessive code-cracker. It is very layered, packing meaning upon meaning. Words often have dual or triple uses. The poetic nature of Hebrew scripture has allowed for centuries of conjecture and deconstruction not unlike that which I experienced in a poetry class in college. The difference is that all of us in that class knew that no matter how many assumptions we made about the meaning, and how cogently we supported our theses, we were never granted any certainty about the true intent of the poet, or the message behind his or her words. Ultimately, the poem remained unsolved.

My grandfather understood this concept. He often warned me that, although we were living our lives according to a strict rabbinical interpretation of the Torah, there was a distinct possibility that we had a lot of it wrong. He was the first person to explain the
concept of a metaphor to me. That’s the thing about the Hebrew language, he said. You never know if you’ve picked the right meaning. It could be literal or figurative. The language could be deliberately obscure, designed to cloak a meaning that only someone with the right code could access. And codes can go wrong. You could be using the wrong key to crack it and get an entirely mixed-up result.

Deborah = Bee.

Deborah = She who speaks.

Deborah = Woman of fire.

My grandfather was confident in his rabbi nonetheless. He reminded me that faith in the righteous was our insurance against error. If we had the right intentions in hand, it was ensured that God would modify his wishes to align with those of the saints leading us. Such reverence was there in heaven for our holy rabbis. The same holy rabbis who had mocked Deborah, who had been chosen by God to lead the Jewish nation to extraordinary victory, who had been blessed with a reign of unparalleled peace and prosperity, and most important, who had been beloved by her subjects and fondly remembered by them.

The author of the book of Deborah was clearly of a very different mind than the fastidious group who chronicled their highly subjective opinions in the Talmud.

“And Deborah rose, a mother in Israel, and spoke.”

This is how Deborah is introduced. Why a mother if she was childless? Could there be a more loving description of her? She was a mother to a nation. She rose to power not as a woman who abandoned her femininity but as one who harnessed its most glorious qualities to lead her people to triumph. Reading this reminds me that, unlike what was taught to me, there is room for
rule breaking in the Jewish tradition. God approves of a little feminism once in a while.

In the story of Deborah came my first opportunity to find a positive reflection in the Judaic mirror. In those early years after leaving, everywhere I went, someone or something wanted to show me an acquired perception of Jewish culture. A stereotype, a joke, a Woody Allen reference, countless such instances of a projected identity I had never been aware of, at least not as aware as I was of my existence within the framework of Jewishness I had grown up in.

No one had ever mentioned Deborah to me, except in passing. The stories of Moses, David, and Solomon were told and retold gloriously, but somehow the women slipped from collective memory, and only their shadows remained.

The anesthesiologist who had put me to sleep before my hernia surgery was Hungarian.

“When did you come over to America?” I asked as he hooked up my IV bag.

“In 1988.”

“A year before communism fell!” I said.

He laughed. “How was I supposed to know that then?”

“I want to go there someday,” I said, slurring a little as the drugs kicked in.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because my grandparents are Hungarian.”

“Which part of Hungary are they from?” he asked.

“Nyíregyháza,” I answered, pronouncing it correctly (
Nyir-ed-huza
).

“That’s crazy,” he said. “That’s where I’m from. If you go, let me know. I’ll introduce you to some of my friends.”

“That’d be nice,” I said as I drifted off.

It’s hard to explain why I started to feel closer to my grandmother in the years after we last saw each other than at any moment during the time we spent together in my childhood. I had once stood alongside her in the kitchen and mixed bowls of cake batter and meringue, and perhaps we had talked of this and that, but even then I was yearning to know the person she had once been.

By the time I came along, my grandmother’s life had been greatly diminished. I never knew her in her heyday, when she was raising a family of eleven with aplomb, sewing her children’s clothes by hand according to the latest fashions she spied at Saks. She could look at a dress and instantly know how to make it; she didn’t even need a pattern. Neighbors whispered that her rich husband gave her free rein, but they didn’t know that the opposite was true. Despite his financial success, my grandfather didn’t believe in spending money on material things. So she slaved away instead, and they kept up appearances. But this was only something I’d heard, you see—from an aunt or an older cousin who had heard it from somewhere else. The stories were all gone by the time I lived in that house—only their echoes remained.

My grandmother was almost a ghost to me then. Perhaps for that reason, her spirit seemed to accompany me on my way out. I
did not feel the separation so keenly because I had always been attached to the memory of her, and that would never fade, no matter how far I traveled. Instead, by freeing myself from the bounds imposed on relationships by the Hasidic community, I was finally able to explore the person my grandmother had been. I opened that folder stuffed full of photographs and documents and started to piece together as much as I could, assembling a chronology of dates, places, and people. Yet there were so many missing elements, and I knew I had to start at the beginning if I was ever going to get the full story.

Three months after my surgery, in the midst of an early-summer 2013 heat wave, I emerged from the airport into the humid haze of Budapest. The anesthesiologist’s friend, who had turned out to be the president of Nyíregyháza’s only college, led me to the spot where his chauffeured Mercedes was waiting. A Hungarian novelist and poet, Zoltán had started studying English only a year ago.

It was painful for him, he said to me in German, that, with the mind of a novelist and the desire to convey all things beautifully, he could not communicate effectively with me. Although we understood each other just fine, I could feel his frustration. For a writer, it would always rankle to be hampered by a limited vocabulary. My German was then still heavily influenced by my native Yiddish, but luckily Zoltán had grown up around Yiddish speakers, and my odd turns of phrase and archaic grammar did not stump him.

“The second language in Hungary used to be German,” he said, “but now it’s mostly Russian. English isn’t even on the table. Don’t expect to be able to communicate with anyone directly,” he warned me. He had found me an interpreter, someone who worked at the college but who had studied in America for a year. I was relieved to hear that.

We took a brief walking tour around the city. The banks of the Danube were inaccessible then, because of all the flooding—across central Europe, train lines were submerged and low regions turned into stagnant ponds. The Hungarian Parliament building, normally the architectural pride of the capital, was covered in scaffolding; only its imposing white spires could be seen amid the extensive renovation effort. We retreated from the noisy dump trucks and worker crews and walked down Andrássy út toward the famous Heroes’ Square. Zoltán had a story for everything; he knew every sculpture and statue. He’d mention them by name and ask me if I’d ever heard of this person or that, but all the names sounded equally foreign to me. Famous Hungarian poet, he’d point out, famous Hungarian artist, famous king, famous general, and famous writer. So many famous Hungarians, he seemed to be saying. I wondered if any of them were famous outside Hungary.

My first glimpse of Budapest—so different from Europe’s other capitals in that it lacks both contemporary chic and the varnished grandiosity of antique glamour—was jarring. Immediately I sensed just how influenced my childhood milieu was by the Old World aesthetic I saw around me. The voluminous block buildings, their facades cracked and darkened with age, reminded me of the impressive synagogues that rose between the tenement buildings of Williamsburg; I especially noticed the various flyers posted at eye level, some of them new, others rotted to strips and pieces by time and weather. Williamsburg, too, had been covered with such posters, called
pashkevillin
; because we had no radio or TV, we resorted to more old-fashioned means of communication and advertising.

In old Buda, the pastel-colored buildings, Bavarian in structure, Mediterranean in dress, seemed fake, like they were part of a movie set or theme park. Their doors and windows were tightly
shuttered, and the small side streets baked silently in the midday sun. The cobblestones seemed manufactured and touristy. Only in the main square near the Fisherman’s Bastion did we find a crowd milling, which thinned out as soon as we retreated from the riverbank.

We sat in an outdoor café in the blistering heat and drank some chilled Tokaji. Zoltán taught me how to toast in Hungarian. “
Egészségedre,
” he enunciated slowly—meaning, “To your health!” Later I would constantly ask him to repeat it for me, because invariably I would invert the syllables or contort the pronunciation. None of the Hungarian I had heard as a child seemed to have stuck with me. “
Paprikajancsi
,” my grandfather had sometimes called me when I was being particularly mischievous. Although it literally translated to “pepper jack,” Zoltán said, it was actually the name of a classical clown character similar to Punchinello. Neither of my grandparents had wanted any of us to learn their native language. Hungarian was used only when secrets needed to be kept or in heated conversations had behind closed doors. It was the language of the past, to which we were not allowed any access. We were the future, and the future spoke only Yiddish.

We had a three-hour drive ahead of us to the great northern plain bordered by Romania to the east and Ukraine and Slovakia to the north, in which Nyíregyháza was only a small city. Zoltán planned to stop for dinner at a guesthouse he knew on the way, about forty miles from Budapest. I was starving. On the way out of the city there was heavy traffic, a result of one of the ubiquitous film crews that was using the highway ramp for a crash scene. Most of the big American blockbusters, Zoltán informed me, were at least partially filmed in Budapest. A stunted and incongruous
economy combined with a complacent government allowed the city’s streets to be bought for cheap.

As we drove, dense clouds piled up in the sky, and by the time we arrived at the little guesthouse just off the highway, they had spread out across the flat plain and seemed to sag just above us like a structure about to collapse. I had the inexplicable thought that if Europe lived under a uniform sky—as if sharing a communal roof—Hungary, at its center, was somehow more vulnerable to its failure. Upon exiting the car, I felt a stiff wind and noticed the reeds that grew by the side of the road whipping back and forth.

Inside the simple cafeteria-style restaurant, the shelves along the wall boasted tall glass jars of pickled vegetable salads—what my grandmother had called
savanyu
,
Hungarian for sour. She, too, had pickled cauliflowers and peppers and cucumbers, anything really, and served them alongside various dishes throughout the year. I asked Zoltán if the jars were for sale or simply decorative. “Both,” the shopkeeper answered, looking nonplussed at the question. There was no menu, because what was on offer here was apparently on offer at every guesthouse in the region, which rarely received ignorant visitors. I played it safe and went for the goulash, my first taste of the stew since I was a child. It arrived, smelling powerfully familiar, in all its brown and soupy glory, a large dollop of paprika jelly on the side. It felt like the first wholesome, truly nourishing meal I had eaten since my childhood. I devoured the entire bowl.